But Bill Alexander's production, with Corin Redgrave in the title role, still strikes me as a grievous disappointment. There is no mistaking the evident desire to make both the play and the central performance seem fresh and original, but you repeatedly sense perversity rather than profundity, clever ideas rather than heart-felt emotion. I have rarely left a production of this magnificent play feeling less shaken or stirred.

The big novelty here is that Lear is presented as a man in vigorous late middle age rather than the octogenarian Shakespeare specified. Redgrave makes his first entrance bent double on a stick, only to explode into mocking laughter at the stunt he has pulled on his family. His daughters, who have clearly endured such tricks too often, are far from amused.

Redgrave's Lear is a bristling-moustached, crusty retired colonel type who has had his own way for far too long. He's a domestic tyrant who laughs a lot just so long as he is getting his own way, but throws childlike, petulant temper tantrums whenever he doesn't. And, for a man supposedly crawling unburdened towards death, he proves surprisingly strong, chucking the vigorous Kent across a table when in his fury.

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It's an intriguing reading but one that bears only a tangential relationship to the character Shakespeare actually wrote. More worryingly still, Redgrave often seems to be observing Lear from without, rather than inhabiting him from within.

Ironic quotation marks seem to be appended to many of his speeches, which are given a highly mannered delivery with distracting hand gestures, chortles and vocal tics. The suspicion grows that Redgrave, the life-long Leftie, doesn't much care for the privileged, ruling-class character he is playing, and is offering a running commentary on him rather than letting the audience draw its own conclusions.

What makes this particularly regrettable is that, when Redgrave stops playing jazzy riffs on the character, and becomes "the thing itself", he suddenly becomes profoundly affecting.

This Lear may lack the required grandeur, but his descent into madness is heart-catchingly caught, as are the rapt moments of spiritual illumination. The simple, sudden "I did her wrong" is beautifully delivered, while his confused humility in the great scene in which he is reunited with Cordelia is almost too tender to bear.

The rest of Alexander's production is as inconsistent as its central performance. The costumes are vaguely Edwardian, but the show creates no impression of a vividly imagined and coherent dramatic world, and Tom Piper's dreary minimalist stage design adds precisely nothing to the atmosphere. Nor is there much evidence of a well-tuned ensemble with an overriding vision of the play.

David Hargreaves is a magnificent Gloucester, who looks far more like one's mental image of King Lear than Redgrave does, and he finds a simplicity and unshowy emotional truth in this admittedly less complex role that too often eludes his more illustrious colleague.

Louis Hilyer is a tremendous Kent, who makes goodness dramatically interesting; and Pal Aron as Edgar gains impressively in strength, despite an absurd first appearance in which he appears to be auditioning for the role of P G Wodehouse's Gussie Fink-Nottle.

Emily Raymond and Ruth Gemmell have gained memorably in nastiness as Goneril and Regan, but Leo Wringer's gurning, West Indian Fool is a poor substitute for Roger Normington's sad old music-hall veteran at Stratford, while Mathew Rhys still lacks charismatic glitter as Edmund.

With a running time of four hours this is, for all its occasional merits, an evening that sorely tries the viewer's patience.